"Do you mean you"re a duffer?" Biddy asked in alarm.
"Frightful, frightful!"
"So that you intend to give up your work--to let it alone, as you advise _me_?"
"It has never been my work, all that business, Biddy. If it had it would be different. I should stick to it."
"And you _won"t_ stick to it?" the girl said, standing before him open-eyed.
Her brother looked into her eyes a moment, and she had a compunction; she feared she was indiscreet and was worrying him. "Your questions are much simpler than the elements out of which my answer should come."
"A great talent--what"s simpler than that?"
"One excellent thing, dear Biddy: no talent at all!"
"Well, yours is so real you can"t help it."
"We shall see, we shall see," said Nick Dormer. "Let us go look at that big group."
"We shall see if your talent"s real?" Biddy went on as she accompanied him.
"No; we shall see if, as you say, I can"t help it. What nonsense Paris makes one talk!" the young man added as they stopped in front of the composition. This was true perhaps, but not in a sense he could find himself tempted to deplore. The present was far from his first visit to the French capital: he had often quitted England and usually made a point of "putting in," as he called it, a few days there on the outward journey to the Continent or on the return; but at present the feelings, for the most part agreeable, attendant upon a change of air and of scene had been more punctual and more acute than for a long time before, and stronger the sense of novelty, refreshment, amus.e.m.e.nt, of the hundred appeals from that quarter of thought to which on the whole his attention was apt most frequently, though not most confessedly, to stray. He was fonder of Paris than most of his countrymen, though not so fond perhaps as some other captivated aliens: the place had always had the virtue of quickening in him sensibly the life of reflexion and observation. It was a good while since his impressions had been so favourable to the city by the Seine; a good while at all events since they had ministered so to excitement, to exhilaration, to ambition, even to a restlessness that was not prevented from being agreeable by the excess of agitation in it.
Nick could have given the reason of this unwonted glow, but his preference was very much to keep it to himself. Certainly to persons not deeply knowing, or at any rate not deeply curious, in relation to the young man"s history the explanation might have seemed to beg the question, consisting as it did of the simple formula that he had at last come to a crisis. Why a crisis--what was it and why had he not come to it before? The reader shall learn these things in time if he cares enough for them.
Our young man had not in any recent year failed to see the Salon, which the general voice this season p.r.o.nounced not particularly good. None the less it was the present exhibition that, for some cause connected with his "crisis," made him think fast, produced that effect he had spoken of to his mother as a sense of artistic life. The precinct of the marbles and bronzes spoke to him especially to-day; the glazed garden, not florally rich, with its new productions alternating with perfunctory plants and its queer, damp smell, partly the odour of plastic clay, of the studios of sculptors, put forth the voice of old a.s.sociations, of other visits, of companionships now ended--an insinuating eloquence which was at the same time somehow identical with the general sharp contagion of Paris. There was youth in the air, and a mult.i.tudinous newness, for ever reviving, and the diffusion of a hundred talents, ingenuities, experiments. The summer clouds made shadows on the roof of the great building; the white images, hard in their crudity, spotted the place with provocations; the rattle of plates at the restaurant sounded sociable in the distance, and our young man congratulated himself more than ever that he had not missed his chance. He felt how it would help him to settle something. At the moment he made this reflexion his eye fell upon a person who appeared--just in the first glimpse--to carry out the idea of help. He uttered a lively e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, which, however, in its want of finish, Biddy failed to understand; so pertinent, so relevant and congruous, was the other party to this encounter.
The girl"s attention followed her brother"s, resting with it on a young man who faced them without seeing them, engaged as he was in imparting to two companions his ideas about one of the works exposed to view. What Biddy remarked was that this young man was fair and fat and of the middle stature; he had a round face and a short beard and on his crown a mere reminiscence of hair, as the fact that he carried his hat in his hand permitted to be observed. Bridget Dormer, who was quick, placed him immediately as a gentleman, but as a gentleman unlike any other gentleman she had ever seen. She would have taken him for very foreign but that the words proceeding from his mouth reached her ear and imposed themselves as a rare variety of English. It was not that a foreigner might not have spoken smoothly enough, nor yet that the speech of this young man was not smooth. It had in truth a conspicuous and aggressive perfection, and Biddy was sure no mere learner would have ventured to play such tricks with the tongue. He seemed to draw rich effects and wandering airs from it--to modulate and manipulate it as he would have done a musical instrument. Her view of the gentleman"s companions was less operative, save for her soon making the reflexion that they were people whom in any country, from China to Peru, you would immediately have taken for natives. One of them was an old lady with a shawl; that was the most salient way in which she presented herself. The shawl was an ancient much-used fabric of embroidered cashmere, such as many ladies wore forty years ago in their walks abroad and such as no lady wears to-day. It had fallen half off the back of the wearer, but at the moment Biddy permitted herself to consider her she gave it a violent jerk and brought it up to her shoulders again, where she continued to arrange and settle it, with a good deal of jauntiness and elegance, while she listened to the talk of the gentleman. Biddy guessed that this little transaction took place very frequently, and was not unaware of its giving the old lady a droll, fact.i.tious, faded appearance, as if she were singularly out of step with the age. The other person was very much younger--she might have been a daughter--and had a pale face, a low forehead, and thick dark hair. What she chiefly had, however, Biddy rapidly discovered, was a pair of largely-gazing eyes. Our young friend was helped to the discovery by the accident of their resting at this moment for a time--it struck Biddy as very long--on her own. Both these ladies were clad in light, thin, scant gowns, giving an impression of flowered figures and odd transparencies, and in low shoes which showed a great deal of stocking and were ornamented with large rosettes. Biddy"s slightly agitated perception travelled directly to their shoes: they suggested to her vaguely that the wearers were dancers--connected possibly with the old-fashioned exhibition of the shawl-dance. By the time she had taken in so much as this the mellifluous young man had perceived and addressed himself to her brother. He came on with an offered hand. Nick greeted him and said it was a happy chance--he was uncommonly glad to see him.
"I never come across you--I don"t know why," Nick added while the two, smiling, looked each other up and down like men reunited after a long interval.
"Oh it seems to me there"s reason enough: our paths in life are so different." Nick"s friend had a great deal of manner, as was evinced by his fashion of saluting Biddy without knowing her.
"Different, yes, but not so different as that. Don"t we both live in London, after all, and in the nineteenth century?"
"Ah my dear Dormer, excuse me: I don"t live in the nineteenth century.
_Jamais de la vie_!" the gentleman declared.
"Nor in London either?"
"Yes--when I"m not at Samarcand! But surely we"ve diverged since the old days. I adore what you burn, you burn what I adore." While the stranger spoke he looked cheerfully, hospitably, at Biddy; not because it was she, she easily guessed, but because it was in his nature to desire a second auditor--a kind of sympathetic gallery. Her life was somehow filled with shy people, and she immediately knew she had never encountered any one who seemed so to know his part and recognise his cues.
"How do you know what I adore?" Nicholas Dormer asked.
"I know well enough what you used to."
"That"s more than I do myself. There were so many things."
"Yes, there are many things--many, many: that"s what makes life so amusing."
"Do you find it amusing?"
"My dear fellow, _c"est a se tordre_. Don"t you think so? Ah it was high time I should meet you--I see. I"ve an idea you need me."
"Upon my word I think I do!" Nick said in a tone which struck his sister and made her wonder still more why, if the gentleman was so important as that, he didn"t introduce him.
"There are many G.o.ds and this is one of their temples," the mysterious personage went on. "It"s a house of strange idols--isn"t it?--and of some strange and unnatural sacrifices."
To Biddy as much as to her brother this remark might have been offered; but the girl"s eyes turned back to the ladies who for the moment had lost their companion. She felt irresponsive and feared she should pa.s.s with this easy cosmopolite for a stiff, scared, English girl, which was not the type she aimed at; but wasn"t even ocular commerce overbold so long as she hadn"t a sign from Nick? The elder of the strange women had turned her back and was looking at some bronze figure, losing her shawl again as she did so; but the other stood where their escort had quitted her, giving all her attention to his sudden sociability with others. Her arms hung at her sides, her head was bent, her face lowered, so that she had an odd appearance of raising her eyes from under her brows; and in this att.i.tude she was striking, though her air was so unconciliatory as almost to seem dangerous. Did it express resentment at having been abandoned for another girl? Biddy, who began to be frightened--there was a moment when the neglected creature resembled a tigress about to spring--was tempted to cry out that she had no wish whatever to appropriate the gentleman. Then she made the discovery that the young lady too had a manner, almost as much as her clever guide, and the rapid induction that it perhaps meant no more than his. She only looked at Biddy from beneath her eyebrows, which were wonderfully arched, but there was ever so much of a manner in the way she did it. Biddy had a momentary sense of being a figure in a ballet, a dramatic ballet--a subordinate motionless figure, to be dashed at to music or strangely capered up to. It would be a very dramatic ballet indeed if this young person were the heroine. She had magnificent hair, the girl reflected; and at the same moment heard Nick say to his interlocutor: "You"re not in London--one can"t meet you there?"
"I rove, drift, float," was the answer; "my feelings direct me--if such a life as mine may be said to have a direction. Where there"s anything to feel I try to be there!" the young man continued with his confiding laugh.
"I should like to get hold of you," Nick returned.
"Well, in that case there would be no doubt the intellectual adventure.
Those are the currents--any sort of personal relation--that govern my career."
"I don"t want to lose you this time," Nick continued in a tone that excited Biddy"s surprise. A moment before, when his friend had said that he tried to be where there was anything to feel, she had wondered how he could endure him.
"Don"t lose me, don"t lose me!" cried the stranger after a fashion which affected the girl as the highest expression of irresponsibility she had ever seen. "After all why should you? Let us remain together unless I interfere"--and he looked, smiling and interrogative, at Biddy, who still remained blank, only noting again that Nick forbore to make them acquainted. This was an anomaly, since he prized the gentleman so.
Still, there could be no anomaly of Nick"s that wouldn"t impose itself on his younger sister.
"Certainly, I keep you," he said, "unless on my side I deprive those ladies--!"
"Charming women, but it"s not an indissoluble union. We meet, we communicate, we part! They"re going--I"m seeing them to the door. I shall come back." With this Nick"s friend rejoined his companions, who moved away with him, the strange fine eyes of the girl lingering on Biddy"s brother as well as on Biddy herself as they receded.
"Who _is_ he--who _are_ they?" Biddy instantly asked.
"He"s a gentleman," Nick made answer--insufficiently, she thought, and even with a shade of hesitation. He spoke as if she might have supposed he was not one, and if he was really one why didn"t he introduce him?
But Biddy wouldn"t for the world have put this question, and he now moved to the nearest bench and dropped upon it as to await the other"s return. No sooner, however, had his sister seated herself than he said: "See here, my dear, do you think you had better stay?"
"Do you want me to go back to mother?" the girl asked with a lengthening visage.
"Well, what do you think?" He asked it indeed gaily enough.
"Is your conversation to be about--about private affairs?"
"No, I can"t say that. But I doubt if mother would think it the sort of thing that"s "necessary to your development.""
This a.s.sertion appeared to inspire her with the eagerness with which she again broke out: "But who are they--who are they?"
"I know nothing of the ladies. I never saw them before. The man"s a fellow I knew very well at Oxford. He was thought immense fun there.
We"ve diverged, as he says, and I had almost lost sight of him, but not so much as he thinks, because I"ve read him--read him with interest. He has written a very clever book."
"What kind of a book?"
"A sort of novel."
"What sort of novel?"